Alien-ated Youth

They're the next step in human evolution. But they're just like everybody else.

At first glance, they look like perfectly ordinary first-graders scribbling feverishly on the blackboard, but there is something striking about the boy's deep blue eyes that suggests a maturity well beyond his years. Jake's in advanced classes and already reading at a third-grade level. Jan is the quiet one, but has a presence that immediately draws attention. Her predilection is toward art, though at the moment she is choosing to write math equations on the board, erasing them as soon as she's completed each of her computations.

Jake's mother is a teacher at this Baytown-area school, and worries that he may be ostracized by his peers if word ever gets out about his special gifts. "He questions everything because he wants to know," she says as her son draws a picture of a lollipop tree. "The questions he asks are not even age-appropriate."

These children tend to know things without ever being taught or told. Jake's companion Jan "can use a compound bow very well," says the girl's grandmother, Jill Spence. "She can shoot a BB gun; she goes fishing." It just came naturally to her, Spence says. She can't explain it.

Jeff Fitlow

Jan, shown with her grandmother, has the Indigo's trait of finding homework boring.

Courtesy of Jill Spence

Spence offers her granddaughter's artwork as proof of the child's special abilities.

They go by many names, such as Star Kids, Indigos or Crystalline Children. Whatever they're called, believers say this group of prodigies started appearing about 30 years ago and may now make up as much as 90 percent of the population under ten. They also exhibit strange side effects, like a higher resistance to pollutants but an increased sensitivity to sugar and food additives. These are babies born with an inherent knowledge of art, language and spirituality, possessing an impressive wealth of wisdom. Some will even go so far as to say these kids are not only prime candidates for the gifted and talented program, but the next step in human evolution.

Parents and those who study these children have been asking themselves why here? Why now? Theories about their origins range from spirits entering from other planes and dimensions to chosen ones delivered from heaven. Some even suggest aliens have been abducting and manipulating the DNA of these children and their parents to prepare us for when they make their presence known. The one thing all these groups do agree on is that the kids are out there, and they're coming to teach us a lesson.

The term Indigo Child was coined 17 years ago by Nancy Ann Tappe, a parapsychologist who developed a system for classifying people's personalities according to the hue of their auras, described in her 1982 book, Understanding Your Life Through Colors. According to her, auras have been entering and exiting Earth throughout history. For example, aura colors such as fuchsia and magenta disappeared from the gene pool 100 years ago (though she was recently shocked to find a fuchsia living in Palm Springs). It stood to reason that a new life color was about to make an appearance.

Tappe was unable to find the new color scheme until a baby was born with a heart murmur at a children's hospital in San Diego whom she recognized as being dark blue. The child died six weeks later, but more and more indigo-colored personalities began to appear in the '80s, and their numbers were clearly rising.

But it was the 1999 book The Indigo Children, by Lee Carroll and Jan Tober, that popularized the idea of the next generation. Carroll was an economics major who ran a technical audio business for 30 years until a visit to a psychic prompted a New Age midlife crisis. He found religion and started traveling around the world giving "self-help" seminars. Accompanying him was Tober, a practitioner of metaphysics and hands-on healing as well as a jazz singer who had toured with Benny Goodman and Fred Astaire. The genesis of the book came when they began noticing similar accounts of strange behavior in children from teachers, counselors and psychologists who attended their seminars. As they began to look into these occurrences, they found kids were indeed being born with an "unusual set of psychological attributes" and displaying "a pattern of behavior generally undocumented before." Using a collection of essays and interviews from experts in the field -- mostly counselors working in such New Age areas as Angel Therapy and alternative medicines -- the book focuses on raising an Indigo Child. Some of the main attributes they describe are a sense of "deserving to be here" and "knowing who they are," difficulty with authority, a dislike of activities that don't require creative thought and a feeling of royalty (and acting like it).

The peculiarities of Jake and Jan (their families asked that their real names not be used) were apparent from an early age. As a toddler, Jan sometimes spoke using her own language. Instead of "cookie," she would say "cookah" and refused to call a sandwich anything but a "phonic." Odder still, she didn't begin speaking until she was three years old. For Jake's part, he had trouble grasping the concept that he was not in charge. "He has to be told," Jake's mother says. "He doesn't think he needs permission." Spence noticed a similar idiosyncrasy in her granddaughter. "You have to coax her to do her homework," she says.

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.....he's already reading at the third grade level. Well considering that's not that hard to do in Houston, TX, I can't take much stock in her word. Huckleberry Finn was considered a children's book in its day-yes that big, fat wordy book was for children, yet teenagers today only begin to read it in advanced classes and barely understand squat. Alice in Wonderland and through the looking glass and what she found there are like super baby-children books, yet most adults now a days can't puzzle their heads around a bloody Jabberwocky poem. I used to instantly solve and read problems simply because I could and then laze about and get poor grades because I wasn't interested at all. But I, along with my peers, could run circles around several Texans at the same age. Yet, my lot were normal for the city area we were raised. Not really all that intelligent-just normal. Put us in a different city, a different state, we're bloody geniuses. Stick us back some hundred or more years and we're not even that capable.

It's absolutely absurd what everyone says is remarkably intelligent when I can list you how much they're not. If your first grader who can supposedly read third grade books, then he should be able disassemble Huckleberry Finn in a second and read my elementary school book of To Kill a Mockingbird in order to compete with that of NORMAL, AVERAGE children some hundred years ago. If he can't, well then, in comparison to back then he's dumber than a sack of potatoes. It's stupid, but our nation is dumbing down people and generations to the point that intelligence standards are lowering significantly. It's not increasing, but decreasing.

I'm an atheist indigo, and what the article describes isn't accurate at all. "God" has nothing to do with it. Ditto with Satan. It's not religious, it's closer to Diane Duane's Young Wizards books. These kids are just really religious.

the past lives is not just jakes past its his souls because this is the ae of aquaious everyone that didnt follow gods plan last life gets a second chance , i will say one thing loki was killed by an arrow through the head thats why we have arrow hats there were keys left through time that only "WE" can see

This is real and its a gift from the lord himself i have a very stong aura so present people feel as though i am diffrent they dont know why they think they just do and its not just naturally being great at activites we dream but our dreams the worlds dreams a phrase came to me once children of eden the purple is a stimulation in the right side of the brain some belive controlling esp and this is very true it beings with a simple day dream then it rolls through the clip as i like to call it i became aware of my ability when i was reminissing that i was never babtised as a child , as i grew very depressed over this prayed to god and said If i died today would i go to heaven i felt goose bumps like ive never felt before and i was told in my mind to go to sleep instantly i feel asleep , ect ( all i can say ) but long story short i belive i would be a great test subject for some research i dont know what brainwave causes this but i do know moses had the gift and he amplified by a golden object when he was building the arc with this blessing you will get a bad feeling b4 something bad happens some call it a gut feeling but nly the ones with the gift can hear it